My father, Gerry, arrived in Perth early September for a 3 week holiday, during which time we would go on a road trip from Perth to Darwin, In European terms this would be a trip from Manchester to the South of Morocco. However as he had flown half way around the world I figured I’d delay our set off so my old man had time to get over his jet lag. Here he is:

Therefore out of kindness I got him up at 7am the next morning so that we could go to Rottnest Island.

Rottnest Island is a small island off the west coast of Perth. It is an interesting place for a few reasons. Firstly it is home to a unique species of marsupial called the Quokka, hence the name Rottnest which is dutch for ratts nest which is all they thought was there when they discovered it some 200 years before the Brits came over. Secondly it has a rather infamous recent history being used as a penal colony by the early WA colonists mainly for aboriginal prisoners. I had been in Perth for months and had not got around to visiting therefore I dragged my father there.

It’s a really pretty Island, the whole place is now a national park and the main mode of transport there is hired bicycle. Indeed the only people who drive there are those who work there and need a special Rottnest driving license. One such person is Mogsy. Mogsy (Ian Monoghan) is a lad that Dean and I went to school with for eight years so it was a tad bizarre to get met at the pier on a small island on the far side of the world by a guy with a Salford accent whom I had known since I was seven. He’s grown a bit since then mind you.

After the initial meetings we went to get my dad a jumper as he was cold. I’d told him he wouldn’t need more than a T shirt as it was a fresh sunny 20 degrees but I forgot thet my dad had not just endured an Aussie winter or indeed a British summer as he lives in Seville where an modest 40 degrees is normal for early september and was therefore freezing.

We then hired a couple of state of the art bicycles for our trip around the island.

Alas there are no pictures of mine, suffice to say is was exceptionally cool, did not have a basket and most certainly was not a girls bike with no gears.

The island is very pretty, and obviously geared towards tourism. There are some lovely rolling vistas and of course what we went there to see: the Quokka.

As you can see they are quite fat and round (they have few predators and are a protected species of wallaby, and are not afraid of people due to getting fed regularly by the tourists), and that has given birth to the particularly apt local sport known as Quokka soccer. Sadly I left my boots in Leeds so we couldn’t get a game going. Besides who could kick something with a face as cute as this:

After the ride we checked out the museum which highlighted it’s infamous past as a prison island. Testimonies from various aboriginal inmates from 90 years ago were around the walls. One was there for allegedly stealing a pipe, disease was rife and sanitation unavailible. Many died there, it was pretty harrowing, but not unique thoughout our colonial history.

We got the ferry back to Perth and my dad promptly fell asleep.

After a couple of road trips and knowing that my father was coming over and we were going to travel from Perth to Darwin together I decided it was time to pimp up my van so it could be lived in. The first thing I needed to do was to build a propper bed for it. Luckily Bronwen (the lady I met in VietNam who helped me out when I first arrived in Perth, you will find her in the blog eating a snake, and will find more of her if me and Dean ever get round to filling in the 2 month gap from Jan to Feb) worked for an architects and she put me in touch with some guys who could supply and cut the relevent MDF for the bed. They did an awesome job.

I supplied the rug, which really holds the van together, drawers and put shelving in it myself with help from Lewis and my replacement roof monkey Gaz.

I then got a mattress to fit off Barra, and the van was kitted out and ready to go:

Here it is modelled by Frenchie.

And here is the perspective money shot:

Not bad eh?

All I needed after that was a sound system which I sorted out with Ben and Damo yet again, the wiring was done by Paddy and Jonski from the orient and finally some curtains which my friend Alana the teacher made for me. She also painted a rather lovely picture of said van which now hangs proudly in the back of it.

NB: Very very cool T Shirt too. This girl obviously has taste.

I can’t thank enough everybody who helped me with it, they were either very helpful or seriously desperate to get rid of me.

You may have heard of a game they play over here that they call football. It’s kind of like Gaelic football, played on a cricket pitch with too many goalposts. It was one aspect of Aussie culture that had passed me by. I decided I had to rectify this. Myself and my workmate Lewis, who is also English and had never been to a game, went to watch the Fremantle Dockers whom we had decided would be our local team. They are a pretty poor team in the top league and so are a bit like my proper football team Manchester City. I also had a deal with Kate from the Orient that I’d support the Dockers if she supported City.

Me and Lewis decided to go to the game and play the total wide eyed, fresh off the boat tourist card. We also may have drank a bottle of vodka before the match so we may have gotten a bit silly.

Here we are before the game.

Freo were playing St Kilda which I am assured are not a team from a remote Scottish island but in fact from Melbourne where most of the top teams are from, which occasionally engenders a bit of resentment from the other states. A mate called Jim from Adelaide (Actually Kate’s feller and the guy who’s swag I stole) gave me the lowdown on the game so I didn’t go there completely ignorant.

Freo play in purple, red, green and white, St Kilda play in red green and white. It was a tad confusing for me, but I do think that there is a niche here for having a second kit. I wonder if I could copyright that idea…

And now for the game:

Here they are passing the ball through the centrecourt trying to avoid going in off the black.

And later on the guy in red says something to the other players. I think the guy in red is the goalkeeper. Just before this St Kilda got past Freo’s offside trap to score a wonderful eagle at the 17th.

In the end Freo lost by some points and a foul. But we didn’t let that spoil our day, we found some Freo fans to get our photo taken with.

Before being escorted out of the ground by the security guard who may well have been a moonlighting Gerard Depardeiu.

NB: Aussie rules Football is a great game and the Fremantle Dockers had a great crowd and we got really into it, shame St Kilda won but it was the end of the season with not much left to play for. The season is over now and I am leaving Freo but I will be keeping an eye out and watching their games on the TV when I can. FREO! FREO!

My third major road trip out of Perth was an escapade into Western Australia’s golden outback. To the mining town of Kalgoorlie and the richest square mile on earth. I went with a friend of mine called Manuela, she’s a cool Italian girl I met and she plays percussion in a samba band. And joining the two of us was a dog she was looking after called fiasco. Here they are:

After the Margaret river debacle I also managed to ruin the clutch by towing 7 water tanks in a trailer, but I had to do that as I had crashed the work truck at the time. So I got a new clutch, a new battery, a new stereo, a full set of new lights and I got two good mates of mine Damo and Benjy who nbormally service trucks to help me out in servicing the van. She drove really smoothly after that even in the dusty outback so all was well.

We set off at 5am on the friday for the 600km drive from Perth to Kalgoorlie. The great eastern highway is very long and straight and at times a bit dull so we kept ourselves amused by playing “I went to the discount giant and I bought” in spanish and singing Bon Jovi songs.

We arrived in Kal (abbreviated of course) mid afternoon and found a very bizarre town. It’s mainly full of mineworkers, the main bar flashes the price of gold and nickel in neon and the waitresses serve beer in their underwear. We took the chance to check out the largest open cast superpit in Australia. It is a staggering half a mile deep and the huge mining trucks look like toy cars as they slowly trundle around the edges.

To give you an idea of the scale, those tiny trucks in the photo have diggers this size:

While we were there Top Gear were also there racing a porsche against a digger around the sides so theres something to look forward to for the petrolheads. It also meant that I got asked if I was with them when I was in the bar as I had a pommie accent. I told them I was if it would get me a drink.

We kipped in the van thoroughly exhausted.

The next day Manuela said she wanted to check out some Anthony Gormley (The guy who designed the Angel of the north) statues that were in a dry lake bed 100+ kilometres from Kal, that sounded fun so we upped sticks and went. I am so glad we did. The drive from Kal to the nearest town to the statues Menzies was epic enough, the roads ere just tracks in the incredible red sand. Some of the roadkill was horrific and at one point an eagle that was eating a kangaroo in the middle of the road just stared down my Van, and Miss Louisa blinked first.

The road goes on forever.

Ominous roadsigns.

And the trip was well worth it. The statues are all in Lake ballard. Lake ballard is one of the dry lake beds in Western Australia, they fill up only when there are huge cyclonic floods once every twenty years or so, but when they do fill up they attract lots of birds, one of which, the Banded Stilt, is one of the most bizarre creatures in Oz, and remember that this country is hope to giant hopping rats, very poisonous everythings, mahoosive sharks and the Duck Billed Platypus. It comes to these lakes to breed but only when they flood so it breeds intermittently to say the least. In the sandy lake bed a species of shrimp lies dormant, and when it floods they all come out. These birds feed their chicks on these shrimps and so they fly there after cyclones from their normal habitat around the coasts just to breed. A crazy life cycle but hey, that’s Australia. Though when we were there the lake was totally dry. It was still striking.

This is a picture on the lake bed and there is an island in the background. You can make out one of the statues on the right hand side. Below is a picture of us with another of the statues.

It was a very beautiful and very out of the way place.

On the way back to Kal we went to check out some of the old deserted mining towns that litter the area from the gold rush days.

Then I had a nap and Manuela too the opportunity to take some photos. She is a fantastic photographer. Here are a few examples:

We slept in a roadside camping spot that night and spent the Sunday driving back to Perth. All in all I wish I’d have put more time aside for the trip because it is a really cool spot.

Road Trip 1; Perth to the south coast (and southern ocean)

I have already explained that I was working as a solar heating system installer, most of the time this entailed luging 300 litre water tanks onto roofs, fitting them, plumming them in and the solar panels too, this is the reason I got a tan even in winter and also why I am now 10 and a half stone, one one occasion it involved an Indiana Jones stylee leap off a roof away from a rolling tank and then a commando roll away along the lawn to stop it falling on top of me, however the work also involved fitting solar pool heating systems, namely heliocoil. And as the guy I worked for, Karl (a crazy Austrian), was the only guy who did this system in Western Australia we got to travel around with work. One such trip took Karl, Lewis and myself to a village called Denmark on the south coast of WA.

It was a 5 hour drive down and we set off at 5am so I slept as Karl subjected the unfortunate Lewis to some really awful Jackie Chan films.

The job was a beauty and didn’t even involve getting on a roof.

Here is the finished job and Lewis’ foot.

On the job we got to see some Kangaroos in the wild, the house we worked at found them a nuisance as they ate their prize shrubs but it was the first time I’d sen them outside of a wildlife park so I was pretty stoked.

The Next day we went to the town of Albany which was originally going to be the capital of WA until the gold boom made Perth the logical base. It has a kind of victorian England feel to it and indeed the land south of Perth is much greener and reminiscant of middle England. I took the opportunity to paddle in the Southern Ocean which after the Atlantic (obviously), the Pacific (In Califonia and Dalian), the Indian (Kho Phi Phi and Freo) and the Arctic (In Norway with Gareth) meant I’d at least set foot in all 5 oceans. There is no pic of that momentous occasion but I paddled at least up to my knees.

Look it was cold. OK.

And there are Sharks there. OK!

We came back via a Vinyard named after Doctor Who’s planet so I bought a bottle of Tawney Port. I hoped it would be bigger on the inside than the half litre bottle I purchased, alas it wasn’t.

Road Trip 2; Louisa Yoko’s maiden voyage to Margaret River

I knew that I would be travelling Australia so I bought a van of my flatmate and Irish cowboy Barra for this purpose. It was a white 1989 Toyota Hiace that he used for work, so with my history and knowledge of cars I figured that would be Ideal for the purpose. Here is a picture of it being modelled by my mate and Orient colleague Kate.

Doesn’t she look sexy. (Kate doesn’t took too bad either).

I had to road test my new Van so Kate talked me into doing a road trip to Margaret River which is WAs surf capital and also where the best vinyards are to be found. We stole her boyfriends swag, grabbed a couple of bottles of whiskey and set off.

The first thing we noticed that was wrong was that the left headlight didn’t work, but that was easily rectified by driving with the main beams on all the time (kids, never take driving or maintenance tips from me; in actuality I just this second arrived in Broome and had the alternator held in place with dowel, this in case you don’t realise it is NOT good). We drove to Dunsborough in the evening from Perth and slept in the van in the car park of the YHA hostel there, Kate knew the guy who ran the place so it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. We got out my deckchairs that I found in a scrapyard and drank some Jamies Whiskey from the bottle, I am very happy to say that I gave Kate a whiskey tooth because of this trip, but her surname is Doyle so it must be in the blood somewhere. I saw a fat thing with big eyes and Kate saw a Possum.

Kate pointed out that my Van needed a name so I came up with Yoko as she was Japanese and Kate spotted the name of a town in WA called Louisa and said that was a good name for a van, I was inclined to agree so we christened her Louise Yoko, I added the title miss to this as I wasn’t going to drive around in a married van. so Miss Louisa Yoko it was.

The next day we awoke to find that the bartterry was flat (I was later to find out that this was due to the alternator not actually being fixed in place and so put in a temporary fix) so I got a bump start of Kates friend from the hostel.

Then Kate took over the driving and took me around several Vinyards, she drove and I drank, teamwork if ever I heard of it.

We checked out a few and I bought a bottle from the Gralyn estate and then we went down to the beach. It was windy as hell but there were still some surfers, and I took the opportunity to test out the 10 second timer on my new camera (bought 2nd hand from cash converters for 30 dollars).

This is a great photo of the beach but is not a great picture of us, I will take this opportunity to put on record that in real life both Kate and I have fantastic arses.

Then we had a nap, when we woke up it was dark and all of the headlights apart from the right main beam had died, we push started the van down a hill and I drove very slowly into Margaret river town and parked in the supermarket car park. We went to the pub and had a decent meal while being entertained by watching the police strip search some guy who had just finished his shopping.

We then went to another pub which had live music. The live music was two guys playing 70s songs in the key of A and there were three punters in the pub including the two of us. Rather typically the third one was a drunk and he came to talk at us for a bit. Turned out he was the guy who had been strip searched, and at one point he even asked us if we fancied coming back to his to see his chicken.

…

..

so

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oh well, we were on holiday:

As you can guess we actually did do that. Bok Bok was a cool chick.

The next day I dropped Kate off at Bunbury bus station (because she was off to Albany, not because she was scared of my van) and drove back to Perth. The only other problem I had after that was complete loss of power in 4th and 5th gears, I decided to get it serviced as soon as I got home.